Song of Ice and Fire... the tv series

For those who have been waiting since 2001 (or was it earlier, this saga has been going on for so long?) for George RR Martin to finish A Dance with Dragons, the news that his fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire has been green lighted by HBO is welcome.
I think HBO sounds like the best sort of place to film ASOIAF as it is a more adult-orientated fantasy series than the various Potter and Tolkien clones that clog up the market. Few series have collected such a strong group of memorable characters together and it'll be interesting to see them on screen. Although the incorrect rumour that Gillian Anderson would play Cersei is sad and the decision to cast Mark Addy as Robert Baratheon has to be wrong when every line of dialogue and action was clearly written for I'M BRIAN BLESSED.

On the other hand I tend not to get too excited by films or tv series of books I like as they almost never even remotely capture whatever it was about the book that I enjoyed. In fact I'm at a loss to even think of a single film that matched a good book... Kiss Me Deadly perhaps but that ignored the book. Er, I'm waffling. Anyhow the commitment is to a 10 episode version of the first book of the series and presumably if it works out the rest will get filmed, which means the author will have to finish Dragons around 2016 so they can film that one too, which is a welcome deadline!